All articles filed in Clay

I am in the process of tearing my studio apart and doing a major purge in preparation for replacing my kiln. I have had a Jen-Ken Bead Annealer for years and have used it for bead annealing and glass fusing. I have been very happy with it. A few years ago, I got a great deal on a programmable remote controller to go with the kiln. And then I started to use the kiln to fire copper clay which necessitated resetting the controller to handle metal firing schedules which go to a higher temperature than glass. So my kiln will now reach a maximum of 2000 F which is suitable for low fire ceramic clays. (cone 04)

Except I love porcelain and stoneware which fire at cone 6. (Some porcelain fires at cone 10 but I am interested in working at cone 6. ). My work space is relatively small but I do a lot of things in it including sewing, polymer, beading, lamp working, fusing, mixed media and metal smithing. I have a couple of enameling kilns that I don’t use that often but that I want to hold onto.

So now that I have done a major purge and rearrangement, I plan to install ventilation for soldering and lamp working and for a new kiln so I can do luster firing and cone 6 firing. And I have to figure how to either sell the old kiln or trade it towards a new model. We’ll see

In the meantime, I really wanted to show you some of the new pottery I’ve been working on. But WordPress is buggy tonight (as it sometimes is-hey I love WordPress but sometimes it’s buggy!)

Instead of uploading pictures of eight different pieces, I have managed to upload one picture eight times. I am utterly baffled at how things like this can happen. This is the second time I have tried to upload the pictures with the same mystifying result. My friend Toni would say that Mercury is in retrograde. But in retrograde in my computer?

It’s not like I don’t already have enough beads, but having access to a pottery studio, glazes and a bead tree has made new beads magically appear in my workshop. The items you see below are pendants and a couple of bead comes.

Here are some beads in their greenware state and decorated state after bisque firing and prior to glaze firing.

And if bead making was not enough, I been making little trinket bowls to hold rings and other small treasures.

I am having fun with different glazes and textures, and finishes.

And I have also been having fun making components for the Into the Forest collaborative polymer clay project.